It is a dedicated gallery to conserving the memory of the lives and devastation wrought by the Third Reich.
It’s very moving. There were lots of photos of so many families and children caught in the web of WW2 and antisemitism. Including life in the ghettos which were overcrowded and miserable, with limited food, sanitation, warmth, and medicine.
I realise how outrageous it is that urban city centres in America are somehow called “ghettos”. The original ghettos were designed to isolate and control millions of Jews during the Holocaust.
There is a tendency to think that we know enough or too much about the Holocaust. In my view, if anything, we don’t learn about it enough. It’s the sheer scale of what happened that still shocks me. It’s a state-wide industrial scale. Like an Orwellian fiction.
Before the Nazis, there were 3 million Jews in Poland. After they left, there were under 200,000 left. The Auschwitz gas chambers were capable of “processing” 2000 lives per hour.
On more than one occasion, the guards ran out of Zyklon-B and fed little Jewish children to the furnaces while they were still alive.
Oct 7 and the Holocaust: the rising antisemitism
Oct 7 was the worst atrocities to Jews since the Holocaust. Eradicating Hamas is thus a just cause. Not out of vengeance, but the necessity of keeping Israelis safe in their homes.
Nevertheless, the attack by Islamist terrorists against the only Jewish state has been accompanied by a rise around the world in antisemitism.
These recent “protests” (with “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” or “Intifada revolution” etc.) give implicit succor to the pro-Hamas fanatics who attack the Jewish identity, and the right to exist. Anti-zionism is anti-semitism.
They should be demanding that Hamas release the hostages of Oct 7. They should not be equivocating Oct 7 with wartime civilian deaths in Gaza. They should be rebelling against hate.
If people retort by saying only a few bad apples were making those chants; then, at what point, do these protests containing rotten apples become bad protesta? If you’re at a protest and people around start chanting something you don’t support, you need to remove them or remove yourself. Otherwise, standing side-by-side, people will assume they are together.
I have neighbors who are almost ninety years old, five in all, who were children in the Holocaust, they were thrown from the trains to survive, they were hidden in piles of animal waste, in dark basements, and in the woods, they were small children then, I talk to them a lot, they say that what happened now This is worse than the holocaust. Maybe because the experience now is still vivid and painful. Or maybe because the place they thought was the safest in the world for them is no longer like that.
ReplyDeleteHi Yael.
DeleteGod bless them.
An interesting historical overlap is that, a century ago, the Middle East was not especially more anti-semitic than most other places in the world. For example, during the Dreyfus Affair in France; many Arabs were sympathetic to Captain Dreyfus and criticised the persecution of Jews in France.
During the 1930—40s, the Nazi Party invested heavily in Arabic propaganda on radio stations which spread their rabid anti-semitism. Unfortunately, this overlapped roughly with the time for considering the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. This legitimised Nazi propaganda that had been festering among Arabs. That rampant Nazi-sponsored propaganda and the establishment of the state of Israel soon after turned the Middle East into the world “Mecca” of anti-semitism. Today, there are more Nazis in the Middle East than there ever were in Germany.
History repeats itself and we never learn.
ReplyDeleteIt's sad.
Delete